WANNA ROAD TRIP?

Are you ready for a road trip like you've never seen before? Then hop in and buckle up for Home Office Highway!

This three-week voyage is putting wheels on the perfect hi-tech mobile office. Functional, informative, liberating & fun, it features three kids, two adults, one teched-out, Internet-connected RV-turned-home-office – with almost 3,000 miles of America to be explored and a new way to work to be chronicled.

Driven by Jeff Zbar, the Chief Home Officer, Home Office Highway shines headlights on a whole new "remote" office.

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Home Office Highway has several new features for home officers, teleworkers, road warriors or anyone who wants balance when they work remotely. First, we’ve posted a library of videos, and created a sister site rich with great cools for working from the road.

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There’s also Chief Home Officer, where home-based workers can discover the technology, tools and tips to work from the home office. With News, Reviews & Tips from the home office’s front lines, Chief Home Officer explores how to become a well-balanced home-officer.

It’s June 2011 and the Chief Home Officer is deep in the throes of Home Office Highway ‘11. We’re heading from South Florida through the South on our way to San Francisco.

You see, Google doesn’t like it much when duplicate content is posted on numerous sites. So to help one site without hurting the other, we’re posting just to Chief Home Officer.

Stop by. Check it out. Look at the cool pix we’ve shot with our new Nikon D3100 digital SLR. See how we’re getting along with the Acer Iconia Tablet on the Verizon Novatel 4G LTE Mifi Mobile Hotspot. Be sure to send us your thoughts or impressions — or restaurant suggestions. We’ve vowed to dine in local establishments whenever possible.

If you’re a home office worker, a road warrior, a teleworker, a virtual officer or just a workationing mom or dad who’s hitting the highway but expecting to take a little work in tow, how will you help those trying to reach you to actually reach you. A voicemail I received today helped highlight that question. It also revealed that with email, texts, pins, BBMs, Facebook, tweets, IM, LinkedIn messages, some people still rely on vmail. And as antiquated as we may believe it to be, we still must serve those people’s needs.

In the message, the person left her query. She also commented that my outbound greeting referenced Cinco de Mayo. A greeting a month old, eh? Goes to show how little attention many of us pay to our vmail greetings.

This got me to thinking, though… Assuming people actually listen to greetings, what should we say or request of those trying to reach us? What about for teleworkers, road warriors and even workationing entrepreneurs?

Summertime’s a great time to hit the open road – without leaving life behind. Technology widely available to the consumer market helps the “anywhere” office – and online personality – come alive without an electrical outlet or Ethernet cable in sight. This is Americana in a way Norman Rockwell never could have imagined.

This summer, the Home Office Highway ‘11 road show will showcase the tech, tools and tips that empower people to work and play from the interstate highway – or the information superhighway. The three-week excursion and social media event will highlight how “location independence” can be found wherever life’s journey ventures.

This year, we’ll travel from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco. Part sightseeing trip, part college tour, all fun-n-games. The van will have laptops, digital cameras and other technology common to the modern family home.

Seth Godin wrote recently of “the end of magic.” He was lamenting how the newness of the new seems to have passed us by — how the really cool tools and applications that once wowed us in the workplace and life now are so commonplace that they are taken for granted, and no longer harbingers of Wow!

Wait. Take a moment to ponder the tools we use and what they bring to our daily lives. You might respectfully disagree.

Every day, I use services and tools that keep me connected with the world outside in ways that still seem magical. My BlackBerry brings the Internet and its motherlode of possibilities to a device smaller than a deck of cards (iPhone users will only smirk at the possibilities borne from their device).

Want to contact a peer, client or someone else from my database? Will that be by phone (office, mobile, home, “other”?), or email, or SMS, or MMS?

Add a new name to Google Contacts — and it’s “magically” duplicated in my BlackBerry. Send an email from my phone and it instantly appears in GMail.

As I prepare to head out on Home Office Highway once again this year, I think about the tools that’ll keep me connected from the road.

June Walker, a tax advisor to the independent / soloist / self-employed and home office business community since 1979, has guided indies through various tax issues for years.

Today, she offers some guidance on handling business and travel expenses. To June, the questions seem the same: Travel expenses, transportation expenses, vehicle expenses – aren’t they all more or less the same thing?

Well, maybe to you they are, June says. But not to the IRS. There are subtle and there are grand differences. Understanding standard business travel and the expenses related to a typical business trip is the place to start.

Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house goes Pat Personal Trainer. Gram just bought a color laser printer and it’s the cheapest way for Pat to print his new brochures. He leaves Friday afternoon. The bus gets him there in time for dinner. He works at the computer all the next day until the wee hours. (He’s sure these new brochures will get him lots of customers.) Very early the next morning he kisses Grandma good-bye and heads back home on the bus.

Pat was away from his home, for business, overnight. It was BUSINESS TRAVEL. Therefore he may deduct travel expenses.

Fans of 24 will recall the messenger bag / shoulder tote that Jack Bauer used to carry. It held various Secret Agent tools – nuclear bomb deactivation tools, that ubiquitous “handheld” to which CTI could send building schematics.

Never saw him pull out lunch or a pair of car keys, though.

Jack Bauer & the Jack Sack

Still, I wanted a bag dripping in such utility. Functional, not too girlish. Effective enough to carry all my stuff, but still macho enough so as not to bring my manhood into question (no, it’s neither a manpurse NOR a European shoulder bag). Apparently, you can find one here.

Any home office worker, teleworker or other mobile tech / road warrior likely could appreciate this lament.

Is there a bag that fits all the stuff the modern tech-laden exec or home-working mom / dad must shuttle?

In other words, what makes a great laptop travel bag? It’s a question I’ve asked for years.

It seems the more digital detritus we amass, the more of it we expect to wedge into a smaller and smaller space. That’s where the Sandisk UltraBackup USB Flash Drive comes in.

This flash drive — or “thumb drive” as some people call it, referring to its digit-like size — is small on size but huge on capacity. Measuring from 8 gigabytes to 32 gigs, this traditional flash drive offers one-touch back-up. It’s ideal for traditional back-up, or just stashing stuff to take on the road.

Good thing, since most IT pros joke about there being two types of computer users in the world: Those who have lost data, and those who will. Read More »

Home office, telework and road warrior technology tips from leading home-business and work-at-home expert Jeff Zbar will be featured in more than two million copies of TIME, Fortune and Money magazines and Time Inc. websites beginning this week.

In a unique promotional campaign for Marriott International Inc.’s Residence Inn brand, Zbar provides two dozen tips on remote work strategies, “cloud” computing and online security. The tips are presented on “bookmarks” bound into the magazines and linked to from the websites. View the bookmark here.

“Road warriors, digital nomads and others who work from the road don’t want to struggle or just get by. They want to thrive – no matter where work and life take them,” said Zbar, creator of Chief Home Officer and Home Office Highway, a site focused on extended, working vacations. “Residence Inn’s campaign reveals in simple detail how easy it can be to achieve location independence and to connect and compute from a workspace other than the home or corporate office.”

The Residence Inn campaign, “Master The Long Trip” appears in the October 26 issues of TIME and Fortune, and the November issue of Money. The online tips debuted on CNNMoney on October 19, and will run through November 30. The tips also appear on Sports Illustrated.com. Read More »

They say video is the Next Frontier for small business marketing. Are you recording?

Videos will be searched, categorized, crawled, archived, accessed and — eventually will replace the typed blog or other commentary for people more interested in having content as eye-and-ear candy than as an exercise in reading.

For that reason, I have a Pure Digital Flip Video HD. It takes sharp, snappy images in crisp HD clarity. I also have a library of home office videos (showcased at the top of this website). Each was taken with a Flip Video.

Small. Simple. Sharp. Easy to share. These attributes describe the evolution of today’s video camera — and what consumers are demanding in them.

These aren’t just for marketing. Contractors can shoot images from job sites. Teleworkers can video their home offices — as proof for their employers that they have a bona fide workspace. Of course, kids can use them for projects and parents can goof off with them (not while working, of course…) Read More »